Monday, April 10, 2006

The reporting on today's massive immigrants' rights rallies betrays the editorial positions of various papers. Just look at the pictures.

LA Times uses this picture:

Fox News admits that, "Unlike earlier protests in Los Angeles and other cities when many protestors waved flags from Mexico and other countries, activists Monday were waving American flags." And they use the same AP photo as LA times... but observe how it is cropped to exclude most of the American flags:Coincidence?

The conservative Orange County Register does not even bother to show the sea of humanity, but pretty much shows a lone person waving a straight, large Mexican flag and a crumpled U.S. flag :

...while the NY Times shows a huge picture of only American flags.

Fortunately, it looks like most major media outlets are following the format of the NY Times. CBS, ABC, CNN, and even some surprises like the San Diego Tribune showed a picture akin to the NY Times... although it was not the lead story on any of them.

It's good for the immigrants' rights movement that they have decided to celebrate their joy in their new home more than their pride in their ancestry. Now if only they could find a good, English equivalent for, "Si, se puede."

The argument that the uninformed try to make is that these Latinos don't assimilate. Well, People forget that it took 3 generations at least for European immigrants to assimilate. That was before satellite TV stations were broadcasting national language TV shows or media was being written in languages other than English.

There are Italian Americans are still a strong sub-culture of their own (i.e. see Sopranos and the Godfather).

Assimilation is different nowadays. And every immigrant group has had to fight for acceptance in this country. And let's point out that I haven't seen anything that talks about any other group but Latinos. I am sure that there are illegal immigrants of all ethnicities.

I have also noticed that NPR at least has been repeating over an over that protesters are waving "American" flags.

USWest: I agree, there is no big difference between the first two photos, but there seemed to me to be a subtle difference... it was interesting to see how two different news organizations used the same AP photo.